An ongoing edible adventure

27 April 2011

Above: See that goofball smile? That's my happy-cuz-I'm-steamboating face. Friends might tell you I look like that a lot. Fair cop. Really good friends will be able to tell the subtle differences between my various goofball happy-cuz-I'm- <insert other food activity> faces.

Why does the phrase "in the soup" mean that you're in trouble?

For me, being in the soup -- of hotpot or steamboat or nabe or shabu shabu or Chinese fondue (whatever you call it where you are) -- is the best way for me to transcend the muck of any internal trouble I'm feeling. It's like a jacuzzi for the soul.

Maybe the savoury hot broth helps to melt away internal emotional blockages. Maybe the community warmth and fuzziness of a table full of people cooking, chatting, laughing and eating around a steaming cauldron on a chilly evening (or even steamy tropical heat, really) softens emotional bristly-ness.

Maybe just to gaze upon the annual Soh family epic steamboat spread during Chinese New Year (below) is enough to make me cackle any crankiness away.

I can't imagine I'm the lone believer in the magical restorative abilities of steamboat. Why else would it have popped up in so many nooks and crannies of this big wide world during our 15 months on the road? And sometimes in the most unlikely of corners?

Okay, so maybe it has something to do with the unstoppable sprawl of commodity-hungry, infrastructure-building savvy Chinese diaspora around the world, and steamboat being the perfect product to pitch to homesick overseas Chinese communities. But why let facts get in the way of a good story, eh.

We didn't order the extent of this feast (below) on purpose. Really! This is what we got after calling ahead just to say we wanted hotpot. The table next to us had the same amount of food. Except their table had 8 people, vs our 2. Still, we made more progress than I care to admit...

Thanks so much to G*Star for sending us this lead.

Another unlikely steamboat satellite was amid the blazing deserts of Abu Dhabi in the UAE.

Far from the glitzy resorts and shopping malls, Qian Zhou Hotpot (Nadja Street, Al Markaziyah West; +971 2 674 5677) is a hidden soupy oasis, with good quality broth, fresh and authentic produce, and an impressive array of dipping sauces for you to use individually or to create a DIY-custom blend. Again, this was a lovely recharge of something familiar and comforting after a month of stuffing our faces with delectable but heavier meats, rices and mezzes of Syria, Jordan and Egypt.

Thanks so much to Louise and Herbert for hunting down this location for us and taking us there and treating us to boot!

Above: See? There's that goofy smile again

Asia is no surprise territory for steamboat. Or so I thought.

In Hanoi, Vietnam, I was utterly delighted by Kichi-Kichi Hotpot (1A Tang Bat Ho, Hai Bà Tru'ng) because it combined hotpot AND a kaiten aka sushi-style conveyor belt. Which means you can slurp away and watch a world (of temptations) go by. Be still my beating heart.

Your fixed fee of under £10 gets you unlimited access to soup stock and anything on the belt. Drinks and premium food items for your cauldron are extra. I found the basic belt spread to be pretty satisfactory, frankly.

Food aside, I ate at Kichi-Kichi with very mixed feelings. Circa 2007 I had a pipe dream to launch this exact restaurant concept in London. So I was very frustrated to see that someone else got to it first, but elated to see that the concept is obviously viable -- the place was packed to the gills when we were there and Kichi-Kichi apparently has quite a few other outlets around Hanoi.

Be prepared to pay between £40-50 per person, but you will be stuffed silly by the end of the evening with impeccable produce and service.

While waiting for your streaky meat to scald, sip on some sake or beer and pick your object of sumo-star aspiration from the posters plastered to the walls.

Shoutout to Team Dom!

You have a choice of letting the waitstaff fuss over you, or you can get involved yourself. Our mate Chris reckons the experience is enhanced by you making "shabooooo shaboooo" sound effects as your swish around your paper-thin beef slices in the soup.

And then there are the steamboat soirees money just can't buy.

Like the one on Wednesdays at the Chinese food resto-canteen at Google HQ in Mountain View, California USA. If you don't work at Google you can't pay money to eat here, but if you've got a friend at Google who likes you enough, you eat for free!

The range of steamboat dishes here was understandably more limited and basic compared to a commercial steamboat restaurant, but because Google works hard to source canteen food ingredients from local farmers, the freshness of the meats and vegetables were top notch.

Many thanks to Gus and Basil (and Larry and Sergei) for a very special steamboat lunch, complete with a view of some hyper-geeky meeting rooms!)

Love also always trumps money at the steamboat soirees hosted by your fabulous friends and their families. So to the Hans, Foxy Foong and "Hollow Legs" Jas and her ever-patient Dom, much much much love.

So once Babs and I settled back into London town after the big gallavant, it was no stretch to believe that steamboat would be a fabulous way to get together with a few London foodbloggers and get to know our London foodie community a little better.

Little Lamb(72 Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1D 6NA; +44 20 7287 8078) in Chinatown is a humble non-descript looking outfit, but when I was homesick for Singapore this past Chinese New Year and feeling in a bit of a funk about work, this Mary had a Little Lamb, and damn it saved my life! (Kudos to reviews by Meemalee and Tamarind and Thyme, whose reviews inspired me to go.)

You can order ala carte, or you and your mates can go for the £20 pax set meal, where each person gets to pick 5 generously-sized dishes.

I was sceptical about the blue swimmer crabs on my first visit, but tried them on my second. They turned out to be surprisingly fresh and meaty, keeping some bite rather than disintigrating into powdery mush after cooking in the broth.

The varied marbling on the beef, pork and lamb slices are a work of art.

Bubble bubble, toil and trouble begone!

The meat skewers are also definitely worth a try -- lots of tantalising chili pepper and cumin spicing.

And now to close, shoutouts to the very sporting food blogger folks who ventured out for a steamy good time despite it being a ludicruously sunshiny day in London! Thank God for Gelupo afterwards.

Remember folks, when life gets you in the soup, the get in the soup gooooooood, get all souped up and then get back in the game. Better yet, have a few friends along. The killer combination of broth and brethren will surely pick you right up and set you off steaming ahead again. Wherever in the world you might be.

But the entertainment, my friends. The entertainment. Why doesn't anyone ever tell you about the sheer entertainment of animal husbandry?

Maybe I'm just too easily amused.

For example, the chickens have a Pavlovian association of the kitchen / backyard door opening and the arrival of edible treats. And so, if they hear the turn of the kitchen door handle, they will scuttle over from wherever they are in the garden at the time, flapping and batting each other out of the way. Sometimes Babs and I wait till they're hanging out at the far end of the garden, then turn the door handle halfway, just to time their race to the door. It's better than the F1.

And a few weeks ago Babs and his younger sister actually managed to hypnotise Layla. (Here's how if you want to try it at home. Results may vary. Miriam was having none of it.)

But what took the cake was the unfolding of this little hunter-and-game drama last weekend. Babs, his Mum and I were all on edge for a good 15 minutes, watching it from just a few steps away. I got as close as I will probably ever get to achieving a childhood fantasy of growing up to be a National Geographic Wildlife photographer.

Who will cave in first? One of the chickens? The cat? Or one of us?

(The photos are best scrolled through slowly and savoured with this soundtrack methinks!)

04 April 2011

If you have not yet heard of the Young Turks -- James Lowe (St Johns Bread and Wine; Fat Duck), Isaac McHale (The Ledbury; Tom Aikens), and Ben Greeno (Momofuko; Noma; Sat Bains) -- you have now. And if you do some news trawling, you will probably hear that they are London's next big dining scene thing.

I see your "flavour of next month", and I raise you a "They're going to rock British food to the next level". My bet is that they're going to do so by calling a few bluffs many of us London diners have until now put up with:

A fabulous meal has to cost a fortune

A chef needs a few secrets and be an asshole to get ahead

Customers want what they want, when they want, and will never trust the chef to choose for them

It's early in the game for them still, so any skepticism out there is understandable. But having now tasted 2 of their collaborative events (my first being their opening Burger Monday act for Young and Foodish) and tried grub ala Greeno, I've decided that I'd rather be wrong betting on these lads than be wrong not betting on them.

My 2nd Young Turks evening was last week at The Loft Project run by Viajante chef Nuno Mendes. The supper club space to end all supper club spaces in Dalston hosts a rotation of up and coming chefs.

This past week the Young Turks were in da house with a £60 six course tasting menu with wine pairing, with front of house being supported by their mates Dan and Chris.

The boys were also supported in the kitchen by comrades looking for plating practice.

A rather softspoken but smiley Nicholas painstakingly sculpts us some canapes:

Smoked cod's roe, oats and kohlrabi. You've heard of jumbo rolled oats, yes? These ones were rolled into cardboard-thick sheet crisps. The cod roe had been moussed, and the kohlrabi was evidently diced by elves.

And now, if you'll indulge me, a triptych tribute to fat. Middle white fat and cured lop. Home-cured by James Lowe, for... 3 months? 4 months? 14 months? Did I hear right? The number kept climbing. Some people have wine cellars. I'm starting to think he's got a fat cellar, with an array of lardy vintages.

Drink pairings for the evening (or at least the wines) were paired by Jade Koch of HG Wines. The evening opened with a delightful rhubarb prosecco fizz.

A luxuriant runny-yolked duck egg, with snails and ramson (aka wild garlic). I've loved eating snails since I was a kid but I'd never had them in an English cuisine setting until now. The French usually drown them in a very garlicky butter, so I thought using wild garlic here was a very clever and refined riff. And especially entertaining because the liquidised wild garlic looked like the snail's slime trail. What are little boys made of, eh.

Wine pairing: A 2010 Chateau de Roquefort "Petit Sale".

There is a lovely bit in a recent interview of James Lowe by Eating East where he says he got to a certain point of his career at St John Bread and Wine where nose-to-tail boss Fergus Henderson felt some of his dishes were getting "a bit racy" -- a prompt for James that it was time to strike out on his own and make a push for his own style.

I am convinced that the raw beef rib with oyster mousse and chickweed is one of those "racy" dishes.

I mean, bloody hell, raw beef and oysters? It already sounds like sex on a plate.

And then you taste it.

And then it's worth clarifying that by sex on a plate I mean the rough, messy kind, with a backstory full of exquisite tension, twists and turns, where the walk of shame the next morning a very heady cocktail of afterglow and a mild gnawing guilt and a half conscious smirk at the surreal-ness of it all.

The dish made me blush, is what I'm saying.

And now it might make James blush too.

I realise all conversations with James from now on may be a bit awkward. I'll risk it, as long as I get the message across that he needs to keep making this dish, at his future gigs and in his future eventually world famous restaurant. Because I reckon all the world could do with this endorphin rush. Possibly even the vegetarians and vegans. No? Oh all right. I respect your principles. More for me then.

Wine pairing: A 2008 Vignobles Guillaume Pinot Noir

****

Here's Isaac prepping some very beautiful beetroot, to be combined with goats milk granita and pickled elderberries.

The end result was subtle, beautiful and delicate, a wonderful yin to the raw beef and oyster's yang. Why can't vegetarian restaurants put forward more dishes like that, celebrating the vegetable, rather than forcing the vegetable into the mould of a meat substitute that will never meet the mark?

Wine pairing: A 2009 Domaine Gerard Metz "Eldelzwicker".

Next up, another dish that sounded great on paper and tasted even better in real life: Jersey Royal potatoes, with monks beard and crab.

The intense sweet-saltiness of the sea in the crab, the slightly crunchy seaweed and the bisque damn near knocked me off my chair. I'm not usually the biggest fan of potatoes, but here it was an integral part of... not a deconstructed, but rather, a yet-to-be-constructed chowder for the gods. It was lick-the-bowl-clean good. I've long loved seaweeds of different kinds in Japanese and Chinese cuisine, and absolutely loved the taste of same-day harvested seaweed in Zanzibar, so I'm really hoping the guys find more ways to incorporate fresh seaweed into future dishes.

Wine pairing: A 2010 Pierre Cros Minervois Blanc

The last dish before dessert was "Chicken, rye, hop shoots and green onions". Except for the roast chicken leg at Le Cafe Anglais, I never order the chicken dish in a Western restaurant, because it's almost always an unimaginative, horribly bland, over dry breast.

Even at home, even when we buy properly raised chickeny-tasting chickens from the farmers markets, I usually end up shredding and salting the breast meat to bulk up a brothy soup, rather than eat it on its own.

But tonight The Young Turks reclaimed chicken breast and put it on back on the high cuisine map. It was moist and had a beautiful flavour, served with a very unusual but oddly comforting rye porridge studded with carrots, mushrooms and other savoury bits.

There was debate about whether there were too many things going on with this dish. Mostly I think there was too much talking going on while I was trying to focus on making this dish last longer.

Wine pairing: A 2010 Domaine Boudau "Le Clos"

We couldn't quite identify the hop shoots in the dish, and most of us had never seen it before in its original form, so Isaac brought out their ziploc stash and we all had a good ol' inhale. It was spring on a string.

For dessert: chocolate malt ice-cream and cascara jelly. Cascara is the dried skin and pulp from the coffee berry, and tastes curiously like tea. Again, there was some debate about the appropriateness of pairing jelly and ice-cream. I've now been educated that it's a traditional dessert pairing from many British childhoods. *Shrug* I didn't grow up here, so it's lost on me I think. Personally I don't like mixing my ice-creams with much. Malt makes the short list. Jelly does not.

I forget the details of what went into the biscuits that went with coffee and tea, but I think it involved oats, orange and thyme?

I'll close out with a toast (of Imperial Brown Stout from my very own neighbourhood Kernel Brewery).

To the Young Turks and their bitchin kitchen team, thank you for an utterly fabulous night. It's a real delight to be part of this very early phase of your grand adventure. Yes I trust there is so much more to come, and that it will be grand and then some.

To Dan and Chris, thank you for taking such good care of us and I look forward to coming to one of your gigs soon.

It's always worth saying -- thanks to all of you for being so patient with me and my camera getting underfoot!

Finally to the many sparks in the room -- Momma McHale, Simon, Shanaz, Xiaohan, Frieda, Miguel, Jade of Bocca di Lupo and Chef Rachel of Spuntino, it was lovely to meet you / break bread with you. I look forward to seeing you all again soon!

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